Hello hello, here’s a review of Songwriting: Harmony offered by Berklee Online. I took the course during the Winter 2021 semester (January - March). It was taught by Neil Diercks. It was offered at a discount ($300 off) when I had signed up.

Course Description

This course is what it sounds like - it’s about harmony in the context of songwriting. By songwriting, we mean songs with vocals. The course dives into 3 broad topics: key colors, power progressions, and modulations. Each week contains:

  • a couple of videos
  • optional exercises (tasks designed to enforce a concept from a video)
  • optional discussion (almost always about finding songs that use the concepts taught in the course)
  • sometimes a multiple choice quiz or two
  • one assignment

I wanted to take this course because I’m a big fan of harmony, I’m a huge music theory nerd, and I love knowing more chord progressions. If you are looking to learn about very fancy harmonic progressions to use in songs, this is probably not the course for you. This course focuses more on how to effectively use chord progressions that are the foundation of many, many hit songs. You will learn about some modes and secondary dominants, but not things like secondary diminished chords, deceptive resolutions of V7, tritone substitutions… If you want to learn that, I’d recommend taking Music Theory and Composition 3.

Though it sounds like I would be disappointed by what this course offers, I thoroughly enjoyed it and appreciated its teaching style of having exercises to employ concepts, and then the assignment being an extension of that. Neil is an awesome, genuinely enthusiastic instructor.

The Good

The content

As a songwriter, all of the concepts in this course are handy to know. It applies to styles like folk, pop, rock, blues, funk, motown, soul… but definitely not jazz! There are multiple videos per week on the topic, with demonstrations of the concepts. It’s very clearly explained.

My main gripes with the content were based around modulations (see below), and I was originally annoyed about how only 4 modes were taught (Ionian, Dorian, Mixolydian, Aeolian). However, not a lot of popular songs use Phyrgian or Lydian (these would be more common in compositions), and nobody cares about Locrian (RIP).

The textbook

The book is available as an e-Book (so it’s cheaper) though the image quality is not the best. That being said, the book has dozens of audio examples and follows the course. (The course is essentially a more well-directed version of the book.)

The instructor

This may vary from section to section but I was fortunate enough to have Neil Diercks as my instructor. As mentioned above, I think he’s awesome. He’s very compassionate and gives in-depth feedback on every assignment submission (a 2-5 minute video). He also gave people the option to take breaks for 2 different weeks, so you were not required to submit an assignment for the week.

The assignments

The assignments directly apply the concepts from the week, as you would hope. They’re easy enough to understand and give you a lot of new material to work with for your own music. If you’re falling behind, you can base your assignment off one of the exercises from the week (assuming you did them), or use that exercise’s submission verbatim.

Some of the assignments were “collaboration” assignments, which was a twist. I suspect this is because Neil teaches a course called “Collaborative Songwriting” where students work together every week. This may be similar to that (though I haven’t taken it). It was a bit nerve-wracking at first but it was an enlightening experience.

The Iffy

The audio examples

The majority of examples are older rock/pop/folk songs, which are classics (and I’m quite fond of them), but it can be a bit hard to hear it in the context of today’s music. There are so many Beatles examples. Other frequented artists include The Police (and Sting as a solo artist), Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Prince.

The few more recent songs I can remember being used are “Happy” by Pharrell, “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz (multiple times, barf), some song by My Chemical Romance, and “I’ve Got a Feeling” by Black Eyed Peas. “Dynamite” is awful. What happened to Taio Cruz, anyway?

The live classes

Live classes would happen 3 times a week, which itself is great, because most Berklee Online courses are once a week. They were an hour each.

The live classes were a bit repetitive in that we covered concepts like diatonic progressions and modes multiple times. This course is a 300-level one, so, in my opinion, we should not have to cover these things. If you don’t know your modes or how diatonic progressions are formed, check YouTube. This can happen because there are no real pre-requisites for Berklee Online undergraduate courses. Anyone can take anything as long as they fork over the cash. I support this concept, but Neil may have been better off saying “Learn this by this live class”.

Modulations

This part of the course was a ??? moment for me. Modulations (key changes) are introduced by the level of “how dramatic they are”. This, as you would expect, could be dependent on the listener. That being said, I strongly disagreed with how parallel key modulations were taught to be less dramatic than relative key modulations. The reasoning of the course author, Jimmy Kachulis, was that in a parallel key modulation, the tonic is the same but the notes of the scale change, but in a relative key modulation, the tonic is changing. This is fine from a quantitative standpoint if your metrics for how “dramatic” the modulations are consist of 1. the tonic changing, 2. the new tonic relative to the old tonic.

Again, my opinion, but moving from C major to C minor is WAY more dramatic than moving from C major to A minor. Like, no question. It is very much a “oh shit” moment when that happens in a popular song. I mean, even using a borrowed chord from the parallel minor is spicy. Moving to the relative minor is a key change people can write by accident. I’ve done it without thinking I’m switching keys.

Modulations should be thought of as a spectrum, a blanket statement like “parallel modulations are more/less dramatic than relative modulations” is too broad. C major to C minor is more “dramatic” than C major to A minor, but you could argue that C major to C mixolydian is not as dramatic as C major to D dorian.

Other gripes with this part of the class that I had:

  • pivot chords are only explained in the context of major to minor
  • “surprising” key modulations were strangely explained (they are neither relative nor parallel, thus “surprising”)
  • the Truck Driver’s Gear Change was not covered, even though it is very common in pop music, much to the misfortune of myself

The Ugly

The Berklee Online Platform

I’ve complained about this before, but the WYSIWYG editor is very frustrating to use. However, if you encounter any out-of-date content, or bugs, the Berklee Online technical team are pretty responsive.

Final Say

If you’re looking to get over writer’s block when it comes to chord progressions, and having a solid amount of chord progressions suitable for singer-songwriter and other (60s and later) popular styles, I’d recommend this course - especially if you get Neil as an instructor. If you’re looking for something that’s useful for jazz or other styles with more sophisticated harmony, this isn’t the course for you.